Top Ten (Failed) Proofs For God's Existence

I think religions are rooted in human psychology and social needs:cognitive needs to find patterns and detect agency, emotional needs for a sense of meaning and control over nature, institutional needs for legitimacy and group solidarity, and the generally advantageous habit of believing what we're told by respected authority figures. Since these are broadly similar over prehistory and history, we should expect some basic commonalities. For and excellent exposition of these, see Houston Smith, The World's Religions. But Professor Stephen Prothero argues that the major religions are also different in fundamental ways, each organized to solve a somewhat different set of problems peculiar to particular societies: Islam, the problem of pride (solution: submission); Buddhism, the problem of suffering (solution: awakening); Judaism, the problem of exile (solution, law and justice),Christianity, the problem of sin (solution: redemption);etc. There are seven dimensions of religion : ritual, narrative,experience,institutions, ethics, doctrines and material. But the mix and emphasis in each religion is different; ritual emhasized in Isalm, Yoruba religion and Aztec/Toltec relgion; experience in Buddhism, Taoism; narrative in Judaism; ethical in Confucianism; doctrine in Christianity, etc. So there are commonalities, but the differences may outweigh them.

 

I think "define" would be too strong a term. He sees religion as sharing "a family of resemblances--tendencies to this belief or that behavior." There are seven of these tendencies or dimensions: ritual,narrative, experience, institutions ethics, doctrine and material dimension. "Something is a religion when it shares enough of the DNA to belong to the family of religions."